10 ESSENTIAL Tips and Tricks for New FALLOUT 4 Players

[0:00]So on this channel I'm constantly looking for ways to break Fallout 4 with brutal efficiency, and while this is extremely fun, it's important to take a step back and simply look at the fundamentals. And what better time than the six-year anniversary of the initial release of Fallout 4 to welcome in new players. Even if you're an experienced player, I'm sure some of this will be helpful for you as well, and that's why I want to offer 10 spoiler-free tips and tricks for new Fallout 4 players. Tip number one, don't worry about following build guides perfectly. Fallout 4 is the most forgiving game when it comes to building your character. Unlike previous installments of Fallout, Fallout 4 does not have a level cap and it allows you to keep leveling until you've unlocked every perk in the game and beyond. While some people criticize this for allowing players to become Jacks of all trades, I view this as a way to allow players to explore different builds on the same character. Build guides give a lot of really cool ideas for themeing your builds, but feel free to think outside the box and tweak your character however you want. If it doesn't work out, you can simply do some radiant quests to gain a few extra levels and get yourself back on track. Tip number two, hoarding is okay. I remember playing Morowind many years ago and looting everything I saw, only to find it was useless junk and not even worth selling. You would think I would have learned my lesson by Skyrim, but still as soon as my hands were unbound, I found myself looting everything and becoming over encumbered. Alas, I realized I was a hoarder. Instead of forcing me to learn my lesson, Bethesda rewarded my hoarder lifestyle by making all of the junk I found useful. Junk can be broken down into raw materials and used to build up settlements. See that building? It's made of forks and buckets. This shack, pencils, clipboards, and ballpeen hammers. This turret, desk fans, hot plates and so you get the idea. Simply collect all the junk you find, and when your inventory is close to full, go back to your settlement and deposit everything in your workshop. So go ahead and live that hoarder lifestyle. Be greedy. Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Tip number three, get lost in settlement building. Settlement building is a new feature of Fallout 4, which allows you to build up settlements to create a new home for those wandering the wasteland. And once you get into it, it's easy to get lost spending hours and hours creating your perfect settlement. And guess what? That's totally okay. Not only is settlement building engrossing and fun, the coolest thing is that when you build new objects in a settlement, you gain experience. In fact, you may gain several levels while building up a settlement and not even realize it. Tip number four, think about maximizing experience. Although there are plenty of ways to continue gaining experience and leveling, maximizing experience you gain from each quest, kill or other experience yielding action will allow you to get to the awesome perks faster. Basically, there are two ways to maximize your experience, either through a high intelligence build or an idiot savant build. Every point of intelligence you have increases the experience you gain by 3%. So if you have 10 intelligence, you'll gain experience 30% faster than the base. Additionally, Fallout 4 offers a second route to maximizing experience gain, which is through the luck tree. With five luck, you can unlock the idiot savant perk. This perk will randomly add a three times multiplier at rank one or a five times multiplier at rank two to experience gain, with the caveat that it will activate more often the lower your character's intelligence. Without getting too much into the specifics, a low intelligence idiot savant character will gain levels at around the same pace as a high intelligence character. So it's good to look at both trees and decide which one aligns better with the type of character you're hoping to play. Tip number five, vendors have everything. Fallout 4's vendors are tremendously valuable. You can get extremely powerful armor, weapons, chems, and settlement building supplies from vendors throughout the wasteland. Their inventory resets every 48 hours, so it's easy to wait for them to resupply and buy more stuff. Be nice to any vendors you find and try to remember where the vendors are located. Of course, it can be really expensive if you become reliant on vendors, which leads to the next tip. Tip number six, charisma is really good. In many games, charisma is considered a dump stat, being left behind in favor of more combat-oriented stats. However, in Fallout 4, charisma is extremely useful. First of all, charisma checks and dialogue not only open unique methods for completing quests, but passing speech checks also yield experience. And your charisma directly affects your chances to pass the speech check. Second, as previously mentioned, vendors have everything you need, so being able to buy and sell with more efficiency will get you access to strong weapons and armor that you may not have found in your adventures. Third, if you do get into settlement building, the local leader perk, which requires six charisma, allows you to link settlements with provisioners allowing settlements to share food, water, and building resources, creating a powerful settlement infrastructure. And finally, charisma actually does have good combat related perks, not only for your companions, but also for you if you choose to travel alone. Tip number seven, don't travel alone. Companions are a heavily emphasized part of Fallout 4. Not only will your companions offer interesting commentary on various quests throughout the Commonwealth, but as you improve your relationships with companions by traveling with them and behaving in a way they prefer, you will unlock conversations related to their backstory, special quests, and eventually a unique companion perk. This perk will stay with your character even after you change to another companion, so the best thing to do is travel with your companion until they idolize you and then swap to another companion and repeat. Tip number eight, power armor is really good. Unlike previous Fallout games, power armor is accessed very early in the main story of Fallout 4, and it is extremely powerful. First, it immediately improves your survivability, taking much less damage from hits. And second, it bumps your strength up to 11, so you can suddenly carry a lot more things and hit a lot harder in melee. In fact, a very underrated build is a simple power armor melee build where you don't even invest heavily into strength, allowing you to invest in other stats making your character even more powerful. This power does come at a cost though. You will need to repair power armor pieces from time to time, which requires materials, and you'll need to use the hard to find fusion cores as the power source. However, this tradeoff is definitely worth it. Tip number nine, modify your weapons and armor. Modifying your weapons and armor will make them much more powerful. Many modifications require special perks and you can build your character around the crafting system. But even without any perk investment, if you find a powerful mod on one weapon, you can strip it off and put it on another weapon of the same type. This allows you to create a Frankenstein's monster of a weapon assembled from the best parts of other weapons. And finally, tip number 10, make the game your own. The thing that makes this game so popular is that there are so many different ways to play it. On this channel, I focus on the min-maxing heavy play style, but I've also seen entire channels dedicated to building beautiful settlements. The modding community for Fallout 4 is one of the best in the world. Survival mode offers a unique way to play the game. There are multiple ways to approach the main story, and the side quests offer great lore as well. There is a strong speed running community and there are also extremely popular Fallout 4 challenge runs. This game offers so much in terms of entertainment both as a player and a viewer, and I encourage you to experience all of it and figure out what you enjoy the most. Variety is the spice of life, and I think the variety of ways to enjoy Fallout 4 is what makes it remain so popular even after all these years. I hope you found these tips useful, and if you have any more tips, please leave them in the comments below. Be sure to like and subscribe as your feedback keeps me motivated to produce interesting Fallout 4 content. And until next time, to survive in the wasteland, you gotta be efficient.